


The Meaning

by cartographicalspine



Series: The Hearthkeeper [9]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Haven (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-04 17:24:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16350962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographicalspine/pseuds/cartographicalspine
Summary: Tamlen needs a moment to orient himself in Haven.





	The Meaning

The air was so much thinner up here, high in the mountains, and came with a sharp, bitter focus that he couldn’t remember experiencing before. Of course, the last few months had been nothing but a sweet and terrible haze for him. Here, the view was both brilliant and dizzying, with peaks and dips stretching outwards like rolling waves into the distance, disorienting and strange. Brosca said it felt like striding atop giants. Aeducan had scoffed but stared contemplatively for a while until the others had drawn her attention back to that awful human village.

“Tamlen.” Two syllables, one voice, and a lifetime he thought he’d lost forever. He felt Hanin beside him, close enough to reach out but not near enough to justify. Should he justify it? Why should he have to?

“It’s beautiful up here,” Hanin said, not looking at him but down into the valley. “I could almost reach up and believe I’d touch the sky.”

He nodded slowly, still trying to get used to being free to do what he wanted. What he wanted was…

Nothing came out, so he closed his mouth again and kept looking. Snow had begun to drift down, still light enough to look pretty without slicking up the frozen paths back down the mountain. But they weren’t headed down now, were they?

Hanin was closer now, drawn up at his side on the ledge. His gaze flickered, turned to him, let him seek it out first. “I wish I could say I felt sorry for them. I probably should, but it’s so quiet without them.”

“I probably shouldn’t,” was his immediate quip, and then he thought he could laugh at how easily it had come. “I’d only say something about it being typical for humans, improving things with their absence.”

Hanin was smiling now, those faded scars on his face looking like a lifetime ago even though it was Tamlen’s own hand that had put them there a month back. “It’s not entirely wrong.”

He agreed, then amended, softly, “but it wasn’t fair of me.”

Not to Cousland, to Amell, to Alistair. Leliana was Chantry and therefore untried, and Morrigan was anathema on principle. But he was trying.

“I just…” Tamlen trailed off, trying to figure out why he felt like he was shoving words around in his head and his own body into a foreign life. “Where do I start? Everything about this place reminds me how much has changed. How much you’ve changed.”

Hanin met his gaze evenly. “And you?”

Tamlen watched him with what he hoped was an unreadable expression, fighting off confusion and frustration alike as he reluctantly acknowledged it to himself. What was the point of denying it? “It would be your doing, of course.”

“...does it bother you?” Hanin's gaze dropped, and he fidgeted with the bindings on one of his gloves. _Little Fidget_ , he thought fondly. _Not when it comes from you._

“That we’re scaling mountains to find some forgotten history for the benefit of humans?” He shrugged instead and hoped it sounded casual enough. “That we started off seeking our People’s lost relics and now we’re getting ready to seek out some lost human relic? I’ll admit it’s a little unsettling.”

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I don’t want you to feel like you have to. It is human history, after all.” Hanin offered him a chance to back out, but the way he was looking at him, he probably knew what his answer would be.

Tamlen tugged his cloak in closer, starting to feel the windchill as evening settled heavily on the mountaintop. When had he become so finicky and inconstant? “What I meant to say is that somehow it fits. I don’t...particularly mind, strange as it feels to say.”

 _This is where I want to be, more than anything._ Few things made sense in the world in the past half-year; by the end, all had lost their meaning but one. And the one stood right here now and slipped his hand into Tamlen’s. It fit so much better than the irony of their journey and the bitterness of their quest and the unfairness of how they had arrived. He said as much, finally, and Hanin smiled and tugged him back from the precipice.

The wind picked up, and they turned their backs to it and headed up the path to find the others, falling into step beside each other as quietly as the snow fluttering to the ground.


End file.
